Microbes play an essential role in ecosystems by catalyzing most biogeochemical reactions necessary for carbon and nitrogen turnover and degradation of aromatic compounds, among others. However, natural environments are highly complex. One gram of soil contains billions of microbial species. Additionally, microbes do not function in isolation but rather act as members of complex communities further increase the complexity in the analysis of microbial communities linked to ecosystem processes. The postdoctoral researcher working on this project will help to coordinate a large international consortium involved in the exploration of thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes recovered from terrestrial environments. Furthermore, knowledge gained will also assist in the design and spread of FAIR Principles for scientific data management in bioinformatics and microbial ecology.
Brief description of job:
We seek a highly motivated postdoctoral researcher to provide support in the analysis of projects originating from the CLUE-TERRA consortium (https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=47300). This consortium was founded by the Microbial Data Science group (led by Dr. Nunes da Rocha, https://www.ufz.de/index.php?en=43659) and consists of the collaborative effort of more than 16 working groups from Europe, United States of America and Brazil.
The data generated from this consortium consists of more than 51 000 metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) assembled from over 6000 samples collected from terrestrial environments. The postdoctoral researcher will focus on the coordination of the several projects as well as perform community and statistical analysis.
Your profile:
- PhD in bioinformatics, computational biology or systems biology with a background on microbial ecology or microbial physiology
- Demonstrated experience in working with omics databases (in particularly metagenomes), python and/or R (other languages are an advantage) and use of related bioinformatics tools
- Solid experience in scientific publishing attested by first authored publications in ISI listed journals
- Ability to work in an interdisciplinary team
- Proficient spoken and written English language skills
Your tasks:
- Provide support in project coordination
- Collect additional metagenomic data from publicly available database
- Perform reconstruction of Metagenome-Assembled Genomes (MAGs)
- Perform MAG classification
- Perform functional annotation of MAGs
- Mining molecular microbial physiology databases
- Data analysis using advanced statistics mainly using python and R based multivariate statistics, modeling and network analysis toolboxes.
- Teamwork within the working group and other collaborating projects in joint data synthesis activities for own and joint publications.
- Writing high-ranking scientific publications and data presentation in conferences
Please submit your application via UFZ's webportal (click here to apply) with your cover letter, CV (please omit your photo, age, nationality or marital status), list of publications and relevant attachments.
Questions: Dr. Ulisses Nunes da Rocha (ulisses.rocha@ufz.de)